


my gaunt uneating heart

by astrolesbian



Series: emma rewrites the mcu [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Jewish Bucky Barnes, Love Confessions, M/M, OR: Hey Why Does Bucky Like Fred Astaire's Movies So Much?, OR: dumb idiot realizes he's in love with his best friend and can't process his emotions, Oh My God They Were Roommates (aka share an apartment), Pining, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, anyway, dumb idiot tries to understand bisexuality in the year 1939, he just has low self esteem and he's angry a lot [megaphone emoji], no plot really. i wish there was, while i call steve a dumb idiot in these tags out of love he is absolutely not That stupid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 06:31:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19806640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrolesbian/pseuds/astrolesbian
Summary: For a couple minutes he slots through some things that are only just now making a whole lot of sense — like how odd his stomach felt every time their teacher in middle school, Mr. Barlow, so much as looked at him, and how he had the urge to go back and see Bringing Up Baby six or seven times just to re-watch the moment where Cary Grant was running around in a women’s dressing gown. It was a comedy, he’d told himself at the time — of course he’d liked it. Funny how things make sense in retrospect.





	my gaunt uneating heart

> _“It’s not enough to say the heart wants what it wants. I think of the ravine, the side dark with pines where we lounged through summer days, waiting for something to happen; and of the nights, walking the long way home, the stars so close they seemed to crown us. Once, I asked for your favourite feeling. You said hunger.”_
> 
> _— Mary Szybist_

“Go home early, Rogers.”

“No sir,” Steve says, and keeps working. He knows this song and dance and he’s not gonna give in to it, not when Mr. Kipling is looking at him with such clear, even pity, not when he can feel his knees wobbling and his ear ringing in the way it does, not when he’s so angry with all of it he could scream. The cans of coffee are getting too heavy, so he walks down a few shelves and works on the tea for a moment to give himself a break. Mr. Kipling follows. 

“Son—”

“With all due respect, sir,” Steve says, with about as little respect as he can get away with, “I need the money.” He almost slips up, says _we._ Most people know Bucky lives with him, but Mr. Kipling doesn’t, and Steve’s not too proud to play on his pity in certain ways. A sick young man who lives alone, who’s got no one to provide for him but himself — that sticks in people’s heads and Steve lets it, these days. If they’re going to think it anyway, he might as well get something out of it. Bucky thinks so, too, but there’s something curious and affectedly blank in his gaze whenever Steve lies through his teeth to someone about living alone. He always shakes it off in a second. But Bucky always was better at being truthful than Steve was, anyhow. 

Mr. Kipling sighs behind him. “Suit yourself, then,” he says, and goes back out front to smile at some ladies who’ve just walked in the front door, arm in arm. Steve only glances at them for a half-second before he grits his teeth and ignores the ache in his body and starts stacking coffee again. 

Mr. Kipling is still busy with the two women when there’s a click from behind him of the door closing.

“Steve, what the hell—”

“Buck, Jesus,” Steve snaps, whirling around. “You’re not s’posed to be in here, I’ve told you a hundred times—”

“I got off early today,” Bucky says, lounging on the rolling step-ladder as if he’s laying down across a couch. “And I came to visit you, so don’t be like that.” 

“You’re gonna get me fired,” Steve says, this time without real heat. He can never stay mad at Bucky for long, not when he’s grinning to beat the sun and directing it all right at him. “So you got finished early at the docks?”

“Yeah, less to unload than we thought,” Bucky says, and stretches his legs out in front of him, watching, somehow interested, as Steve stacks cans. “So they kicked us all off and told us to go get laid.”

Steve cocks an eyebrow at him, trying his best to look unimpressed despite the dull flush the words bring to his neck. 

“I’m just quoting, Stevie,” Bucky says. “Direct from the source.” His smile goes mischievous. “Not saying I wouldn’t like to follow his advice—”

“Aw, shut the hell up,” Steve says, “leave that kinda talk for the dance halls.” 

“I don’t talk like that to dames,” Bucky says, putting on a false, offended air, though his eyes are still dancing. “Jesus, maybe _that’s_ why you can’t keep a date happy, huh?”

“Eat shit,” Steve says. He starts stacking boxes of crackers instead. “You know why I can’t keep a date and it’s not because I don’t know how to talk to them.”

He whacks at his ear a little bit, as it buzzes again, and Bucky’s eyes zero in on the side of his face, grin fading. 

“Is it getting bad?” he asks. 

Steve shrugs, uncomfortable. With Bucky it’s never pity, which is a change from the rest of the world, but it _is_ a kind of constant, zeroed-in attention that makes him hot under the collar, nervous somehow. “Not any worse than usual.” 

“C’mere, let me look at it,” Bucky says, sitting up.

“No, come on,” Steve says, shrugging him off. “I got work to do, okay? I’m done in a few hours, then you can fuss all you want.” 

Bucky sits there watching him for a second, quizzical and a little nervous, like he can’t quite make out whether Steve is actually sore or not, then he relaxes into a grin again and stands. “Yessir,” he says, and winks. “I’ll let you finish your very important work.”

“Get the hell out,” Steve says, and shoves him. As Bucky leaves, he takes an apple from one of the crates and takes a big bite out of it, ducking and laughing when Steve tries to shove him again and get it back.

“I gotta _pay_ for that, you fuckin’—”

“Aw, give it a rest,” Bucky laughs, “I’ll pay you back, you know I’m good for it.”

“Good for about nothing else,” Steve gripes, which makes Bucky laugh again, full and low, before he ducks out the door. Steve wipes at the sweat on his forehead. Then he gets an apple for himself. Might as well buy two, now that Bucky started the whole thing. 

He takes a bite and goes back to the endless monotony of stacking. Out front, he hears Mr. Kipling switch on the radio. He hears Bing Crosby fade in, voice low and slow and even — _oh, you’re getting to be a habit with me —_ before Mr. Kipling makes a noise of annoyance and changes it. 

Steve frowns. He likes Bing all right. But he can imagine Mr. Kipling’s glare if he were to pipe up and request a music change. So he keeps his good ear open and his mouth shut and waits to see what he’ll settle on. It ends up being Fred Astaire, which isn’t bad. Bucky likes him; Steve looks over when they’re at films sometimes and catches him leaning forward in his seat, mouth half open, watching Fred with a sort of burning intensity while the rest of the audience is fixated on Ginger’s laughing face. It makes Steve feel like he’s caught Bucky at something, but he’s never been caught doing the catching. Bucky’s always too intrigued. 

Once or twice he’s heard him in the kitchen, after a film, trying out the moves for himself and swearing when he doesn’t get them right. Steve always pauses in the doorway and leans his head against it, listening and listening. He never moves a muscle ‘til Bucky’s given up and flopped onto the couch. He doesn’t know why it freezes him up so solid — he wishes he could make his way in and be casual about it, wishes he could get out a sketchpad and settle in and capture it somehow. Bucky in motion, dancing and grinning, the sweat at the hollow of his throat where his shirt’s unbuttoned. Maybe that’s why he can’t get up the courage to go in and draw him. He’s a formidable thing when he’s joyful like that. 

Steve realizes he’s stopped shelving and, blushing, goes back to it. Luckily for him, Mr. Kipling hasn’t noticed. 

From the front room, he hears _heaven, I’m in heaven_ as Fred Astaire finishes off the song. He sort of wishes Bucky had stayed longer, if only because he knows that when the music came on Bucky would have been tapping his fingers in rhythm against the shelves, maybe even spun a few times to make Steve laugh. But then again, Bucky’s got places to be. 

Good for him, he thinks, a little sourly; least he gets to have more fun tonight than Steve’s gonna have. 

When he does end up getting home, it’s to an empty apartment, and he huffs a knowing sigh before setting his dinner and his day’s pay down on the table. He locks the door behind him, hangs his hat on the hook, and flops down on the couch, arm over his eyes to keep out the last vestiges of light from the day, and he stays that way for a while. He could eat, he supposes, but he’s more achy than hungry right now — Steve’s never needed to eat much, which is about one of the only convenient things about him being so little and so sick all the time. They spend far less on food than any other bachelors their age. 

He lays there for an indeterminate amount of time, drifting in and out of a doze, before he hears music starting to play, from either the floor above or below them. He isn’t sure which. 

_Blue moon,_ it goes, warped and sad-sounding through the boards and Steve’s ear. _You saw me standing alone. . ._

Steve lies there listening to it, feeling a tug in his chest that he doesn’t want to think about in too much detail, doesn’t want to unpack. He could put it down, he supposes, but there’s nowhere for it to go, not really; he could tell someone, but there’s no one here to tell. And even if Bucky were here, Steve doesn’t like to worry him. He worries enough already about Steve’s other, more immediate issues. 

He wonders where Bucky is, just now. Out at a dance hall, making eyes at someone. He looks good this time of year — his smile gleaming across rooms and jumping out at you. He never has trouble finding what he wants, if he wants it, but Steve has learned not to go with him anymore, because it just makes him mad. It’s all so effortless for everyone else, to reach out and have people look back at you. People don’t look back at Steve. He’s used to it, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t still sting. 

Sometimes, he thinks, with an irrational annoyance in his stomach, Bucky doesn’t even need to leave the docks to get what he wants. 

He leaves the arm flung over his eyes and lets the music lull him to sleep. 

“Steve.” 

The whisper’s at his good ear, but it’s clumsy, too loud. Steve opens one eye, then closes it.

“You’re drunk,” he says, unimpressed. 

“Don’t be that way,” Bucky says, and smacks a kiss on his cheek, then snickers to himself. “You gotta — bed. Sleepin’ on the couch’s bad for your back.”

“Yeah, all right,” Steve says, and sits up, wincing and wiping the kiss off his face. Bucky’s like this, drunk — affectionate and tired and always laughing. He likes it, most of the time. Today it feels strange, unfair somehow. “Have fun tonight?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, and wobbles as they walk, laughing into Steve’s hair. “Wish you’d’ve come.”

“I’m no use dancing, you know that,” Steve tells him.

“Still want you around,” Bucky says. “Anyhow, you’re not that bad.”

“Yes, I am.”

“No, I’ll prove it,” Bucky says, tugging at his hands. “C’mere. Get over here—”

“I’m not dancing, Buck,” Steve says, and swallows a laugh at his enthusiasm. “Let’s just get to sleep, huh?”

“Okay,” Bucky says, blinking at him and taking a few more clumsy steps forward. “C’mon.”

It’s so easy to change his mind when he’s like this. Steve is usually the stubborn one, anyway, but Bucky has his moments — except now, when all he wants is to do the latest thing someone suggested. Steve grins at him.

“You’re sloshed,” he says, half fond and half exasperated. “‘S a wonder you could even get your key in the door.”

“I wanted to get home,” Bucky says, and wobbles again. 

“Well, you made it,” Steve says, and helps him into bed, going to take off his shoes and nodding in the general direction of his suspenders. “Go on, get those off.”

“Gotta — gotta take me out first,” Bucky says, and tries to wink, but he’s clumsy about it. Steve swallows another laugh. 

“Go on,” he says. 

“You do it,” Bucky says, challengingly. 

Steve looks up at him, and holds his eyes for a second. Bucky is delighted and drunk and laughing in the eyes. It’s all in good fun, to him, right now. Steve sits back on his own bed and doesn’t break the look.

“Who’d you go out with, tonight?” he asks, and Bucky screws up his face. Not like he’s trying to remember, but like he’s trying to think of a substitute name to cover up the name of the person he was _actually_ with. Which is enough to answer Steve’s unspoken question, a question he’s been trying to figure out how to pose for the last couple months, since he saw Bucky staring at Fred Astaire the way he was doing, since the day when Bucky came home from work flushed from more than carrying boxes or the winter cold and trying his damndest to hide it. It had clicked all the way in one of the colder February nights when Bucky’d gotten back from drinking and dancing and he’d fallen into bed and stared up at the ceiling, then said _that Henry Oliver fella, he danced me outta business tonight,_ but he hadn’t seemed too torn up about it. Just pleased in some secret way. 

“Alice James,” Bucky says finally, frowning a little. “Then some other people, at the dance hall. She got tired’ve me.”

Steve nods, reaches out, and pats his shoulder. If that’s all Bucky wants to say about it then it’s all he wants to say. But it’s hollow, having it confirmed but not confirmed, to understand it but not be trusted with it. He doesn’t have any secrets from Bucky, nothing this big, anyway, and it eggs at him. 

“You can tell me if you want,” he says, finally; Bucky probably won’t remember it in the morning either way. “But you don’t have to. I think I know.”

Bucky’s brow furrows again.

“Stevie,” he says. 

“It’s okay,” Steve says, then stands again. “Lemme get you a bucket. You might need it.”

“ _Stevie,”_ Bucky says. “Listen. I just—”

“We don’t have to talk about it,” Steve says, trying to be gentle. He doesn’t know how to say it, how to even start; whether to lead with _it’s all right_ or _I get it_ or _I’ll never tell anyone, never_ or _me too, sometimes._ The last is the truest and the scariest, but — the most worth it, he thinks, too, if he ever gets the chance to say it. The real question is whether he should say any of them when Bucky is drunk and might not hear it, or might not mean it. He’s a little mad at himself for doing this now, but Bucky had looked up at him like that with his mouth laughing and half-open and red and Steve had — well. He’d needed to know. Who it had been he was kissing tonight. 

He brushes the hair off Bucky’s forehead, where it’s fallen, sweaty. Bucky catches his wrist in one hand.

His thumb moves against the skin of Steve’s wrist, and he feels it all the way down his spine. Then Bucky lets go and makes a face like he just got hit by his drunken nausea, and Steve goes to get a bucket. 

When he gets back, Bucky is asleep, or appears to be.

When he wakes up in the morning, Bucky’s already left for work. 

Right, Steve thinks. So that conversation’s . . . been had. 

He swings his legs off his bed and leans over them, elbows on his knees and hands gripping his hair, and he doesn’t move for a little while, trying to make sense of it all. 

He doesn’t have work at Mr. Kipling’s today — Steve only goes there on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, because they’re not often terribly busy, and it’s all right for Mr. Kipling to have someone who isn’t as strong or fast when no one’s really coming in to get their food for the week. Steve doesn’t like knowing that that’s why he was hired, but at least it’s a job, at least it’s _something._ The rest of the time he does advertisements and logos. He’s got one going on right now for a bar two blocks away. They want a bear in it, so the day before yesterday he and Bucky trudged over to the library and Steve hunted down nature books that have sketches of bears for him to work from, and Bucky got an armful of new novels to tear through. One of them is upside-down on the table now; Steve scowls and picks it up, puts a bookmark in it. 

Then he gets to work drawing, and he doesn’t move from the spot, except to make two sandwiches and stick one in the refrigerator, until he hears Bucky’s key in the door. Even then, he doesn’t look up. He feels like they’re both, suddenly, treading a very fine line. 

Before he can panic too much, though, Bucky blazes in the door with as much energy as he always does, hangs his hat on the hook, and shucks off his jacket, already up in arms about the heat. “God _damn_ it’s blazing out there,” he says, hanging the jacket, too, then rolling up his sleeves and shoving the suspenders off his shoulders to dangle there, at his hips. “S’ bad in here, too. What is it? Must be a hundred fuckin’ degrees—”

“Check the thermometer, it’s only seventy-five,” Steve says, amused despite himself. “Your own fault you wore your jacket in the sun all the way home.”

“Looks good on me,” Bucky says. “Maybe I wanna show it off. And seventy-five is still too hot for March. Didja eat?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, and nods toward the kitchen. “Made you something too.” 

“You’re a real stand-up guy sometimes, you know that?”

“I have my moments,” Steve says, and goes back to drawing the bear. They’re okay, he thinks, with a crushing relief he both had and hadn’t expected. He thinks about asking him about it. It would be easy enough. _So last night,_ he imagines himself saying, _all that stuff I said_ —

And then Bucky might interrupt him, laughing, sheepish in that way that’s charming on him somehow. _Yeah. I, uh. Didja mean it?_

 _Sure I did,_ Steve imagines himself saying. Because really, the idea that he’d get sore over something like this when Bucky’s spent all of both their lives looking after him, when he’s the most important person in Steve’s life now — so what if he looks at Fred and not Ginger? So what if he dances sometimes with the men from the docks? 

But then Bucky sits down and digs into his sandwich and Steve loses his nerve. Maybe he’ll talk about it himself, in time. It seems wrong to draw it out of him, to make him confess when there’s nothing to confess to. He should wait, he decides, going back to the ad. Wait ‘til Bucky tells him himself. It would be about trust, then, not about Steve putting the question to him and making him answer. And he wants to know Bucky trusts him with it. 

He keeps drawing instead, starting on the next project he was offered, a logo for a bakery sign in Bucky’s old part of the neighborhood, when he gets sick of the bear. Bucky drifts to the couch, picking up his book from the table and laying across it, hitching one leg up over the length of it and letting the other fall to the floor. Steve watches him sit, watches as a lock of hair falls free across his forehead and he irritably pushes it back.

Then Bucky looks up at him. “What?”

“Take your shoes off,” Steve tells him, “or you’re cleaning the couch come Sunday,” and goes back to his work.

He hears Bucky kicking off his shoes with only mild grumbling, and doesn’t look up again until he’s sure Bucky’s engrossed in the book — and sure enough, when he does, the hair has fallen down on his forehead again, but he’s made no move to push it back. 

Quietly, Steve turns to a new page in his sketchbook and gets to work on him. 

Back at Mr. Kipling’s store the next Tuesday, Steve thinks with a jolt that maybe Bucky’s sweet on someone. 

It would explain him not telling, he thinks, because Bucky likes to stand in front of people and use himself as a shield, and he would keep his trap shut forever if he thought someone else might be hurt by him opening it. It’s only that he usually tells Steve everything, even if it’s meant to be a secret to everyone else. 

Everything’s been the same for the past few days, Bucky slouching around on the couch and his bed reading books and goading Steve into arguments about whose pictures are better, Clark Gable or Fred Astaire, even though Steve’s said his piece on that half a dozen times already (Fred’s a fine dancer and singer, but that carries him; Clark, meanwhile, is an _actor,_ so of course his pictures are better). They went out on Saturday, not to dance but to get a drink at the place on the corner that Steve’s drawing the bear ad for, and stumbled home laughing after drinking more than they meant to, but that always happens when they go out. 

Most of the time, though, he and Bucky just weave around each other in the apartment, easy as anything. They’ve been doing it for the better part of their lives. Steve knows Bucky’s shape behind him in the mirror in the bathroom, shaving while he tries to get his hair to stay off his forehead where it ought to be, and he knows the steady rise and fall of his chest at night, and he knows his laugh in the kitchen, the low sound of his voice along with the radio. Even the scuff of his shoes against the floorboards. He doesn’t know his own body half as well as he knows Bucky’s. 

He hasn’t been going out much more than usual, but Bucky’s usual is still a fair amount. Now that they have money again, three jobs between them and spare enough to get more than the bare minimum, Steve can’t find a real argument against Bucky having a good time, and dance halls don’t cost you anything anyway, not if you don’t drink, and when he’s not out with Steve, Bucky usually doesn’t. It’s why the other night was a surprise. 

Well. Maybe that’s the difference, then. Because Bucky drinks when there are other people with him, when he knows he’ll get home safe even if he can’t walk straight. 

Steve tries to consider the idea that there’s someone else Bucky trusts to get him home each night, and he can’t do it without gritting his teeth. 

He doesn’t think it’s fair, really. It might even be downright selfish. But every bloody nose and bruised eye he’s ever gotten should ring out to the world how selfish he is, how reckless, how he throws everything else to the side so he can make his point. Bucky calls it _foolhardy and too fucking noble,_ the way Steve throws himself into the ring even when it won’t help. Steve thinks it might be that, and it might also be that sometimes getting himself punched is the only way people’s eyes don’t immediately skim over him. He wonders if it’s possible for it to be both at once. 

He stares at the boxes in front of him and suddenly feels tired enough to sit back on the rolling step stool for a moment, folding his arms over his knees and looking forward without seeing much. 

He tries to tell himself he’s always known Bucky is gonna fall in love with someone someday, that their routine and their careful peace will be shattered. Sure, he always sort of thought it would be a dame, but just because these last few months disproved that theory shouldn’t mean anything different for the end result. There will inevitably be someone who Bucky cares for more than him, and so he will leave, and Steve will be alone again, truly alone, the way he’d been for a while after Ma died and before he and Bucky struck up this new arrangement, this new little household. That’ll all fall to pieces and he’ll have to figure out the rest of his life and the arc it will take. Folks do that every single day — deal with change, deal with partings and new meetings. Steve can do it too.

He tries to tell himself that for the rest of the afternoon, but a knot forms in his chest, and something mean and greedy claws at his stomach, and it doesn’t let out when he tries to tell it to go. 

“You all right?” Bucky asks, when he gets home. 

“Long day,” Steve says, which isn’t a lie. 

Bucky gives him a sympathetic look. “Get some rest, then. I was gonna go out with some of the fellas from work, anyhow.”

The mean greedy thing tugs its claws in deeper, deeper. “Sure, all right,” Steve says. “You have a good time.” 

Ma used to say all the worst things in the world happened on Mondays, on account of the Devil having all that extra time on Sundays to plan it all out. Steve never really thought that made much sense, considering, so he’d just nod and pat her arm and roll his eyes at Bucky across the room, when he was there. And that’s another thing — he’s never quite realized how much of Bucky there is in all his childhood memories until he’s left alone with the time to stew and search for them. 

Because there’s a good few days, after that first night where he goes out with the other dockworkers, where he comes home late and leaves early, and Steve wakes to empty rooms and falls asleep to too much quiet and one night he suspects Bucky doesn’t even come home, not for any of it. He feels it settle on him as he walks to work, pushing his shoulders down even more than usual; he buys himself a lemon candy and sucks it while he stacks the boxes, feeling the bitter taste of it run down the back of his throat. It puckers his lips, it’s so sour.

But it’s a Monday, when he gets back from delivering his ad design to the baker he made it for, and Bucky’s standing in front of their window, using it as a full-length mirror like he likes to do. He’s got his hair slicked back and his shoes are shined, and he’s doing up his tie, tongue stuck out in concentration. Steve watches him, dumbstruck somehow at his strong, agile hands, even though he’d seen them a million times before. And then he saw a dull red mark at the bend of Bucky’s neck, only barely still resembling a mouth. It could have been a birthmark, it was that small, that purple-red; Steve would have thought it one, if he hadn’t known Bucky didn’t have any. 

Steve gives him a nod and ducks past him and collapses onto his bed, presses his face into the pillow. He tells himself he’s tired, and kicks off his shoes. He tells himself he’s tired, and he does not think about someone making that mark on Bucky’s neck, running a thumb over it, smug; Bucky’s eyes wide and blue in the dark, his mouth veering into smug, too, but mostly just well-meaning, curious. 

He tells himself he’s tired, and he sleeps like a baby, or like the dead. 

When he looks over, an indeterminate amount of time later, Bucky’s sitting there in the dark. 

He’s still got his shoes on. Steve thinks exhaustedly that he really oughta take them off, and he’s standing before he can think about it much, walking over and unlacing them. And then he reaches out to Bucky’s face, wondering if he’s sleeping or just exhausted, and Bucky reaches up and wraps his fingers around Steve’s wrist and opens his eyes. Big and blue and wide in the light that comes in from the window. Drunk, Steve thinks. He must be. 

Bucky’s, drunk in the dark, his hand on Steve’s wrist, thumb moving — Steve only has a second to think _we’ve been here before_ when Bucky’s sitting up on the bed and drawing him down at the same time, threading his free hand into the hair at the back of Steve’s neck and pressing their mouths together. And he tastes like booze, his mouth hot as a brand against Steve’s, and it should feel uncertain, should feel strange, but it only feels good, feels _known,_ because Steve belongs to Bucky in every possible way already, what’s one more? 

He’s dizzy with kissing him, just from that. He could stand there hovering and kissing him forever. But the hand in his hair slides down to his hip and tugs him forward and then he’s slinging one leg over him, climbing over him in the bed, and Bucky rocks his hips up and Steve gasps against his mouth and Bucky says, breathless, “Stevie,” the way he’d said it that night in the dark, pleading. Then, “ _fuck,”_ a deep groan, close to pain but just a few shades off. And Steve thinks something’s off about all of it, because no one’s ever wanted him before, he’s only ever wanted _them_ , only ever imagined feeling like this because of something other than his own hand, his own imagination, and Bucky’s mouth is on his neck and it feels _good_ even while it starts to feel distant, and Steve thinks, with sudden, horrible finality — _I’m dreaming._

Then he opens his eyes in a dark bedroom that, thankfully, does not have Bucky in it.

“God _damn_ it,” he says, and rolls over, and buries his face in his pillow, and screams. 

He can’t look Bucky in the eye after that for two days. Afterwards, it gets easier. But he feels like it’s written on his face those first days, etched into his skin — _I dreamed about you._

He thinks — _of course this was it,_ this thing he was not letting himself know, because it would have made things too terrifying, too difficult. But just as quickly as it came, the thought fades. For a couple minutes he slots through some things that are only just now making a whole lot of sense — like how odd his stomach felt every time their teacher in middle school, Mr. Barlow, so much as looked at him, and how he had the urge to go back and see _Bringing Up Baby_ six or seven times just to re-watch the moment where Cary Grant was running around in a women’s dressing gown. It was a comedy, he’d told himself at the time — of course he’d liked it. Funny how things make sense in retrospect.

And he starts to understand it better, after. Having secrets you’re desperate to keep, even from people you love. Especially people you love. He thinks he’s always wanted Bucky, but it had hidden itself away, before now, not reaching back because he’d never reached out for it. But now, because he’s opened the door, he can’t close it. But the worst part isn’t the slow torture of Bucky’s lazy smiles or mussed hair or the hollow of his throat when he undoes the top two buttons of his shirt. It’s knowing that he can never, ever breathe a word of it. 

Bucky likes men, after all, that’s — well, not quite established fact but well-hinted at, enough that Steve can draw a conclusion without ever needing to actually ask (as much as he might want a verbal answer). But that doesn’t mean he’d ever want _Steve,_ not when no one else ever has, not when Steve regards his own body with a distant, hopeless revulsion that he usually manages to pack away and not think too hard about. It’s only in dreams that Bucky might look at him like that, and dreams aren’t reality, however many of them he’s been having since the first. Awake, as well as sleeping — and isn’t that a double-edged sword, to be free of the confusion but full to bursting with everything else, with the shape of Bucky’s fingers and the smoothness of his gestures when he takes out a cigarette and taps it against the table, twice, before lighting it. The noise of the match being lit and the glow of his face in the tiny little flame. The slow unfurling of the smoke off his tongue and out the window. Everything else. 

He feels like there’s a fist eternally stuffed between his teeth. A gag, a punch, a self-inflicted wound, the rotten taste of his own blood from his knuckles — sometimes he wants to howl with it, can only wrestle with the urge and wish it gone. But there are things you can’t just will away. If it was just want he thinks he’d be able to do it. But Steve had to go and love him like he does, and that makes it all inescapable. 

(Bucky’s mouth around one of his Lucky Strikes. His body sprawled across the couch, uncaring. The way his collarbones look, half hidden by his shirt. Steve’s knuckles in his mouth to stifle whatever he might try to say, teeth biting down, down, down.)

He goes two days feeling like he’s drifting in and out of the world, struck dumb by the love in his gut. Then he shakes his head and tries to get back to business. _Business_ being the ad designs he has to finish up, even if drawing always does a slow turn, easy and delicate as a waltz, and he ends up drawing Bucky or passers-by on the street or the neighbor’s tomcat or Bucky, again. His hair is damp from washing in the sink, his undershirt’s shoulders spotted. Steve etches in the towel around his neck and considers the rest. 

“Look, my ma wants to invite you to our Seder this year,” Bucky tells him, all in one breath, not looking at him. Steve drops his pencil. 

“I’m not Jewish.”

“You don’t think we know that?” Bucky says. His voice is light, but he’s still looking out the window. “Jesus, if you were she woulda had Becca marry you by now, she’s still looking for a nice young man for her—”

“I’m not a nice young man.”

“Sure, I know that, and you know that, but Ma doesn’t,” Bucky says, shadow of a grin on his face, and then he finally turns. “And I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell her when I’ve tried so hard to convince her you’re a good influence on me.” 

Under the smirk, his face is almost unbearably earnest.

Steve laughs, and then takes another look at Bucky’s expression and taps a finger against the table. “Why?”

That shadowy, careful smile again. “Because I know you used to have Easter dinner every year with your ma,” he says. “And I know it hurt you last year when you couldn’t, and it’s still hurt you this year. My ma said it might do you good. And I think it would.”

“Bucky,” Steve says, overwhelmed by the simplicity and the unending warmth of the gesture. Overwhelmed by the thought of Bucky seeing him sad and thinking of what he could do to fix it. It was such a small thing, and yet. His chest hurts a little with it, constricted and fierce, but not enough so that he wasn’t grateful. “Thank you. Of course I’ll come.”

“Good,” Bucky says, “because I already told her you said yes so she could work out seating arrangements.”

Steve laughs again. “Do I haveta wear a tie?”

“What the hell do you think we are, a buncha Catholics?”

Steve shoves him. “Fuck off.” 

Bucky shoves him back, Steve elbows him on the back, Bucky flicks him in the ear — it goes on from there for a good minute until Bucky grins and says uncle and Steve lets go of his earlobe. Bucky flops back onto the couch and kicks him in the leg for good measure, but Steve ignores it, just looks up at the ceiling of their apartment and tries to breathe with some kind of steadiness. He’s got a question, too. An easier one than the one he wants to ask, but still not easy on its own.

“Would you come to church with me?” Steve asks him. “For Easter, I mean. I know you don’t believe in it, but.”

Bucky looks up at him. His hair’s a mess, Steve notes, with a certain wild feeling in the pit of his stomach, and his eyes are soft and understanding. 

“‘Course I will,” he says. “You only had to ask.”

Bucky stands out in the congregation — Steve feels guilty about it for a while before he realizes Bucky really doesn’t mind the glances and confusion, and then he just lets his eyes drift close and listens. It’s not his first Easter service without Ma, but last year he was surrounded by people all through it, everyone reaching over and patting his hand and wishing him well and praying for her. Last year she was _mentioned_ at Easter, on account of her being a well-known member of the church and having died so recently. Steve wonders if Bucky knows part of the reason he was invited was to take the eyes off Steve and onto himself. He doesn’t think he’d mind, at that. 

It’s different being there without her. He’s so used to her thin, pretty voice singing next to him, the relish with which she greeted the other older members of the congregation in Gaelic. He doesn’t know much, himself — enough to say _hello, god bless you, how do you do, goodbye,_ that kind of thing. But she could have conversations, even if they weren’t with him. He misses that — her easy control over it, the way she would grip her friends’ arms and bend over laughing. He never minded missing the joke. 

He feels Bucky’s hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” he says, barely more than a breath. The priest, up front, is blessing the Sacrament. “You with me?”

“Always,” Steve says, before he thinks about it too hard. He opens his eyes again and watches as the priest takes a sip of the wine, remembers the way Ma would press her palms to her chest and sway, back and forth, how deeply and visibly she believed in a larger thing than any of them could see. He believed in it easier, too, when she was still here. He manages a wan smile at Bucky, just barely glancing sideways.

Bucky nods, squeezes his shoulder, and lets go.

Afterwards, the vultures descend — all the old friends of his mother asking who Bucky is, is he joining, why on Earth Steve brought to him Easter. Multiple older men slap him on the back and call him Mac, ask him why he hasn’t been there since Christmas. Colleen, his mother’s closest friend, feels the need to kiss him on both cheeks and call him _a stóirín,_ which he can tell nearly makes Bucky laugh, but they both keep it together and play their parts. 

Bucky says he came because he knew it meant a lot to Steve’s ma that they were friends, Steve says he brought Bucky because he didn’t want to be alone. None of it’s a lie. 

It’s only when they get out, a block away, that Bucky bursts into laughter and slings his arm around Steve’s shoulders, and Steve buries his face in his hands and groans, long and loud. 

“I _knew_ they’d do that,” he says mournfully, and Bucky messes up his hair and then tugs Steve’s hat down on his forehead, playfully. 

“Just wait ‘til you get the third degree from my aunts,” he says, and tucks his arm around Steve’s shoulders. “C’mon, let’s go visit your ma.”

The graveyard is not empty, and it’s not somber, either. Steve feels good about that. 

Bucky takes a stone from his pocket, small and round, and puts it on top of Ma’s gravestone, then presses a kiss to the tips of his fingers and leaves that, too. Then he stays still, arm still around Steve’s shoulders, and Steve takes a deep, shaky breath, hands in his pockets, and says “Hi, Ma.”

Bucky’s arm tightens, just a little. 

“I bet you’re confused about the rock this dolt just left you,” Steve says, and wipes hurriedly at his face. “I was, too. But it — it means something, if you’re Jewish. And he says I’m family so you’re family so we’re a little bit Jewish, I guess. Which I guess makes him a little bit Irish Catholic but we just won’t let on to his ma about it.” He takes a shaky breath. “I really miss you. Service was beautiful, everyone asked after me. They’re trying to take good care of me, I bet you asked them to even though I always told you I could look after myself but — I guess you liked to make sure about things like that. I got Bucky though. He learned from you, I think. He’s always getting on my case about something or other, my lungs, my ear, my eyes — you’d be proud of him.”

Bucky laughs. 

“I hope you’d be proud of me, too. I want to — shit.” He wipes at his face again, takes another breath, tries to keep it together. “Sorry for swearing. Anyway. I want to make you proud. I hope I’ll know someday, if I’ve done that.”

He carefully bends and puts the flowers he brought, lilies, for Easter, at the foot of her grave. 

“I love you, Ma,” he says. “Say hello to Da for me.”

They don’t look back, when they go. Bucky doesn’t let go of him, either. 

About halfway back to their apartment, Bucky clears his throat. 

“She would be, you know,” he says, almost offhandedly. “Proud.”

He still hasn’t let go of Steve. Somewhere along the line, Steve’s arm has snaked around his middle, and they’ve been walking like that, gripping tight. Steve knows there are tear tracks on his face, knows that anyone passing will know something’s wrong or something’s off or something’s sad. He doesn’t know how to care when it’s all hitting him again, like a wave, even though he’s lived without her for more than a year. 

When Bucky says _proud,_ he turns his face in against the collar of his shirt, and breathes in as deep as he can; smells sweat and aftershave and Lucky Strikes and the proof that Bucky, at least, is still here. 

He doesn’t answer. He knows he would start to cry in earnest, if he did. So he just nods, against the side of Bucky’s neck, so he can feel it as it happens, and then they go home. 

Something hits him hollowly in the gut that night, something that makes him shake again with frustrated sobs — that Bucky had done everything note-perfect, that he’d done everything he could to make sure Steve, if not happy, was better off than he had been in the morning. He’d fended off the old ladies at church with an ease that somehow managed to charm them. He’d gone with him to Ma’s grave. He’d left the goddamn stone there. 

_You’re my family, so she is too._

It’s so awful to even _think_ it wasn’t enough — but even after all this time and all this — all this closeness, all this being _family,_ Steve still wants more, wants _Bucky,_ with a kind of unrelenting howling hunger that he wishes he could will away with enough energy, make things easy again. And Steve still wants him to _tell_ him, to trust him with it, and he wants — he wants to scream into his pillow and fall asleep exhausted from tears and stand and cross the room and climb into Bucky’s bed, kiss him and tell him _close your eyes, pretend I’m someone, one of the fellas you dance with, I just need — I need_ —

But he doesn’t know what it is he needs, which one of the wants is the right one to pursue. It makes him feel like an animal, digging his fingers into his blankets and staring at the slow rise and fall of Bucky’s back in the dark. 

“You’re a rotten, selfish bastard, Steve Rogers,” he whispers to himself, and stands up to get a glass of water. He tries not to let the floor creak; Bucky is sleeping. 

While he’s standing in the kitchen drinking the water, cupped in his hands from the sink, suddenly too tired to get a glass, he looks over at the cheap calendar nailed to their wall, the red circle on it, and realizes he’s going to have to do this all over again in a few days. 

Steve loves Bucky’s family. He always has. 

Mrs. Barnes likes to tell Steve he’s too skinny as if he doesn’t already know it, and Mr. Barnes taught him how to shave even when it was clear he wouldn’t need to for a few years’ time. They’re warm and they’ve always been friendly, but Steve’s always been starving for the moments he gets to spend in their house, surrounded by other laughing people, an echo of what life might have been like if Da hadn’t been lost to the Great War, if Steve had had a brother or sister. Or three. 

Bucky’s sisters are some of his favorite people in the universe, barring Bucky himself. When he was younger, they seemed — well, not _perfect,_ but unflappably, eternally _interesting._ Becca ran up and down the stairs, shoes clattering and kicking up dust, her braids swinging back and forth like bits of rope. She talked back to Bucky even though he was older and sometimes stole his trousers — she started nicking Steve’s, when she realized they fit her better — and she ran outside in the dust kicking balls around with all the kids on the block until she seemed to go through a magical transformation at eleven, slipping back into her skirts without losing any of her fire. 

Bucky’s other sisters, Heather and Agatha, were calmer and quieter but no less interesting. Heather was bookish and fanatical about stories, begging Bucky to tell her tales and making up her own when he inevitably lost interest. She wrote for newspapers now, in serials, and in secret — she’d showed Steve and Bucky one afternoon in November, her words under a false name. 

“I tried Anonymous,” she told them, “but they said they needed something, so I told them Jacob K. Turner. Someday it’ll be my name, though. They said if these do well, then maybe I can get them under Heather Barnes.”

“Heather L. Barnes,” Bucky told her, and ruffled her hair. “All the great authors have an initial in there somewhere.” 

“I’ll illustrate,” Steve offered. Her eyes welled up when she hugged them. 

“I knew you’d understand,” she said, muffled against Bucky’s shirt. “I knew it. Please don’t tell Ma.” 

Family secrets, Steve had thought at the time. Being involved was a little intoxicating. 

Aggie didn’t have the temper of Becca or the dedication of Heather, but she made up for it by having fun — why shouldn’t she, Bucky always said, when she was sixteen? She was as good a dancer as Bucky, her hair whipping around her in its careful curls. Bucky’s Ma was always pulling her skirts down an inch, and she’d wink at Steve, friendly and confidential as a sister, and roll them back up. Steve still remembered the time three winters ago when he’d been really, genuinely ill — close enough to dying to feel it knocking — and the Barnes sisters had all showed up at his Ma’s door, carrying hot soup and coffee and challah, settling around him and chattering until he forgot how awful he felt. They all kissed him before they left. 

“You don’t die, now,” Becca said, stern as her mother. “You’ll break our hearts.”

Steve remembers that he laughed at her and didn’t answer. He remembers he couldn’t bear promising them anything. But in the end, he supposes, he hadn’t died. 

He does end up wearing a tie to the Seder dinner. He doesn’t know why. Bucky doesn’t comment except to fix it, his hands warm and welcome where they brush against Steve’s neck and then leaving just as soon as they came. Steve doesn’t like himself for leaning into it, and he doesn’t like how sick with longing he feels after, when Bucky grins at him sideways and taps on the door. 

Becca flings it open with no abandon, just enthusiasm, and she makes a point of hugging Steve first.

“You’re alive!” she says, beaming; this has become their standard greeting.

“For now,” Steve says, and hugs her back. “How’s everything?”

She sighs, her cheeks puffing out. “Have I got some stories for you. Hello, James.”

“Rebecca,” Bucky says. Their overt formality is just as much a game as Becca exclaiming that Steve is alive. They shake hands like stuffy old men and beam at each other. 

Then Heather and Aggie swarm the door, tackling Bucky in hugs and waving at Steve, and Bucky thrashes playfully and calls out for help and Steve laughs and crosses the doorstep, leaving him to fend for himself. 

Mrs. Barnes is in her best dress and an apron, fussing with the food. She and Mr. Barnes, and two other people, a man and a woman, are all having a quick-paced conversation in Yiddish. A quick look at Becca tells Steve it’s faster that she can easily follow, so they go in and sit at the table, and Becca clasps his hands in hers. 

“I’m so glad you came, Steve,” she says, “it’s so dull without Bucky around, it really is. I miss the two of you tearing around in here like you lived here.”

“I miss it too,” Steve admits. “It’s nice to be on my own, but you all were always good to me.”

“What’s family for?” Becca says airily. “Speaking of which. This is my auntie Ruth, and my other auntie Sarah — like your ma, isn’t that sweet? And my uncle Leonard and my other auntie, she’s also Rebecca—” She waves people over and they shake Steve’s hand, and then they drift off to rejoin the party. She looks like she intends to keep it up for a while when Steve puts a hand on her arm to stop her. 

“There’s so many people here,” Steve says, faintly. 

“Did he not tell you?” Becca says, waving energetically at some of the young men clustered across the room. One of them lets his eyes catch on Steve; Steve wonders if he’s sweet on Becca, if he’s jealous. “It’s our family of course, but Mama invited some other people from temple too. Passover’s about sharing with the community, and anyway she likes to make our family bigger. She’s going to be ecstatic when Heather and Aggie and I all get married.”

“What about Bucky?” Steve asks, his mouth traitorous, before he can stop himself. 

Becca looks at him, for a long, careful moment. “Bucky isn’t going to get married,” she says, with delicate certainty, and Steve knows in that moment that she knows, too.

“No,” he says, nodding, “you’re right, I guess he’s not.” He pauses. “She’ll be happy,” he adds, uncertain now, “with the three of you?”

“Well,” Becca says, obviously trying to lighten the air, “we’ll have to find a fella as fine as you, Steve Rogers, but I don’t see why she’d make any objections unless any of them are _Italian_ or something, seeing as we already let an Irish Catholic in the place.” She elbows him in the side. “I heard Bucky went to service with you.”

“Mass,” Steve tells her, “on Easter.”

“It’s terribly kind,” she says, and pats his hand, “of both of you, I mean, to do that for each other.”

“Becca,” Steve says, “this is just as much for me. I like being around your family, it’s a nice change.”

She tosses her hair and seems about to say something else when Bucky clatters into the room and falls into the chair next to Steve. “ _There_ you are,” he says, as if Steve has run ten miles and he’s only just caught up. “Becca, you should go entertain Arnold over there, I heard he’s a good dancer.”

“I am not going to marry a man named Arnold,” Becca says, haughty and smiling. 

“Well, shit, I didn’t ask you to marry him,” Bucky says, “but you could save the poor fella a dance.” He’s grinning like there’s something Steve isn’t privy to in the grin, something reserved for little sisters. “Now go.”

“You get Steve to yourself all the time,” Becca says, “and I miss him. Steve, how’s the drawing?”

“It’s all right,” Steve says. “I’ve gotten a few ads recently. The one in that bakery your ma likes, I drew that.”

“Did you really?” Becca says, astonished, and genuinely happy for him, which is sweet. “Oh, Steve, that’s wonderful. Say, you should draw me!” She holds her hands up and grins angelically. “You always used to. I know Heather doesn’t like it but Aggie and I sure do.”

“Don’t have any paper,” Steve tells her. “Tell you what, for your next birthday, I will.” 

“Cheapskate,” she cries, “you only don’t want to get me anything else,” and Steve laughs, full-bodied, and next to him, Bucky laughs too. 

Heather and Aggie cluster up, then, Aggie leading a boy with curly hair by the hand and tugging him into the seat next to her. “Steve!” she says, “Bucky, meet Abe, he’s swell. Abe, this is my brother Bucky and his friend Steve.”

Steve locks eyes with Bucky. _Swell_ means they’re seeing each other, and they’re both disinclined to like men that the girls are seeing. It’s worse with Bucky. He gets stubborn about his sisters, protective and sharp, prickly almost. Steve raises an eyebrow at his expression, keeps looking until Bucky makes an unsatisfied noise and turns away, but Steve is sure at that point that he’ll be civil, so he looks back to Abe and lets himself be introduced. 

Abe is taller than Steve (but then again most everyone is) and he looks at Aggie out of the corner of his eye like she’s something he never dreamed he could touch, not in all the world. Steve softens towards him a fair bit at that kind of awe. It’s very decidedly what Aggie deserves.

“I haven’t seen you at temple,” Abe says, making conversation. 

Steve nods. “I’m just a friend of the Barnes’.” 

“Steve’s practically our brother too,” Aggie buts in, “Bucky doesn’t go anywhere without him attached to his hip.”

Laughter from Heather and Becca. The back of Steve’s neck prickles. Bucky laughs too, a second too late. 

“Have you said hello to Mama yet?” Heather asks, prodding Bucky in the side. 

“What, and leave Steve to the vultures?”

“Oh, please, we’ll look after him,” she says, “go on and see her, she misses you awfully, you know.” She blinks at him in a pleading way. Steve reaches over and pats Bucky on the shoulder, careful to keep it quick, but Bucky looks at him with something like grim understanding. 

(“Every time I see her it’s the same thing,” Bucky had told Steve the night before, chest rising and falling in the dark. “Asking me when I’m gonna get a better job than the docks, when I’m gonna find a girl, when I’m gonna stop loafing around being a goddamn fool—”

“She doesn’t think you’re a fool,” Steve had said. 

“She _knows_ I’m not,” Bucky had said, “but she thinks I’m acting like one, which is worse. It’s not like I wanna disappoint her, you know.”

“I know,” Steve had said, “I know,” and it had echoed through the room and then Bucky had sighed, and rolled over, and dispelled it.)

Now, Bucky cracks his neck and smiles and walks over to his mother and father, and Steve watches him go for a moment before looking back to the girls. Heather settles in to the place Bucky had vacated and leaned in, starting a new conversation, and Steve answers, and laughs, and thinks — _I love them all,_ and brighter, fiercer, _I still have this._ Maybe that’s what Bucky and his ma had meant, bringing him here today. He twitches up to look at Bucky’s back, his shoulders broad, the way his hips narrow, his hands in his pockets and messing up the look of it. His mother is smiling and looks a little weepy, his father is laughing. Steve thinks, a little more desperately, _I’ve always had this._ He thinks of running away to his empty apartment in those weeks after Ma died, sure that he would never have a real family again, and Bucky coming after him, hand on his shoulder, brushing those doubts away, turning them silent. _To the end of the line._ He just hadn’t ever caught that the invitation was just as much from all of them as it was from Bucky. 

“You’ve been a real piece of work,” Heather says quietly, noticing his line of sight, “staying away from us so long, Steve.”

“I know, Heather,” Steve says. Then he takes a deep breath, looks at her, and Aggie, and Becca, and then at Abe, who looks confused. It’s funny enough that it gives him courage, makes his shoulders feel lighter, and he glances once more at Bucky’s back and knows he and his ma are okay, at least for now. “But you girls can forgive me, right?”

“Seeing as it’s a holiday,” Aggie chirps, “I think we’ll manage. And you have to promise to dance with Heather later, _her_ young man isn’t here—”

“Aggie!” Heather’s cheeks are bright red. “Don’t say that so loud.”

“You’ve got a guy?” Steve asks. “Who? Do I know him?”

“I don’t have any guy,” Heather says, hands over her cheeks, huffing at her sister. “Which _she_ knows, it’s not as though any of them ever _like_ me—”

“Oh, dear,” Becca says, and takes her by the arm. “Come on, Heather, honey, let’s get you some air. Aggie—” 

A stern look.

“Oh, all right, I’m sorry,” Aggie says. “But I didn’t know she—”

“Enough, Ag,” Steve says, though he can see from her face that she really didn’t mean anything by it; Heather will realize, too, once she’s done being embarrassed. He shakes his head at Abe, who is smiling a little nervously. “I hope you know what you’re getting into.”

Aggie snorts. Abe laughs, surprised. 

“I think I do,” he says. “I think it’s worth it.”

Steve does not look at Bucky’s back again when he answers, but fuck, does he want to. “You know something,” he says, “I happen to think so too.”

The prayers before dinner are all in Hebrew, so Steve doesn’t try to discern meaning from them, just keeps his hands folded in his lap and watches Bucky’s face. They’re sitting across the table from each other, Aggie and Becca on either side of Bucky and Heather next to Steve, one of the many guests at his other elbow. There’s a lot of ritual to it, rhythm and routine. They drink wine and pass food around the table in circles, and Heather explains in a whisper (luckily, she’s got his good ear) the significance of each of the items as they come, whether or not he looks confused or not. Bucky winks at him from across the table, silently, and Steve grins back before Bucky turns and looks at his father at the head of the table. 

The actual dinner — the part that’s not ceremonial — is delicious, as always, and Heather and Mrs. Barnes do their level best to make sure both Steve and Bucky eat more than their fair share. 

Steve’s buzzing off the wine and full and sleepy from the food, slumped back in his chair enough to show his appreciation but not enough to be rude. It’s a fine line he learned to toe in this very room, and has been refining for the past ten years or so. He looks over at Bucky, laughing with his sisters, and feels a rush of steady, easy contentment that tends to come with spending time with Bucky but feels stronger and larger with his recent realizations. 

Then he sees Aggie and Abe shyly holding hands on top of the table and something drops out of his stomach. _Bucky isn’t going to get married,_ Becca had said, and he wonders how long it’ll be before there’s rings on all of their fingers and it’ll start to be strange for Bucky to bring his best pal around to family gatherings. Then he wonders if Becca knows Steve might not ever get married either, when Bucky is it for him in the way he is—

He sits up a little straighter in his chair, stomach churning with alcohol and too much food and something else. There’s noise all around him, surrounding him, a happy family blanketing him, but it’s not comforting like it usually is. He’s locked in the thought of Bucky and him at this table, two years ago, three, six, ten, _fifteen;_ all his life he’s been tugged back here sooner or later. They’re his family as much as they’re Bucky’s, the only thing he’s got left, and it occurs to him that even so, this place does not feel like _home,_ and neither does the house he lived in with his mother that he still stops on the street and looks at sometimes. Their apartment is home, but that’s only because Bucky’s home, Steve’s wide-smiling North Star, something he orbits around but always comes back to, with the inevitability of the winter or the summer coming back after their nine months gone or the Cyclone plummeting towards the earth after it climbs. 

Bucky stands up to avoid Becca adjusting his collar, messes up her hair, goes up to his father and bums a match; Steve watches him do it and feels like he’s not in control of his eyes or his limbs or his heartbeat and he thinks _I love you so much I could die,_ _I could eat myself alive, I could rot with it. There’s nowhere to put it. It will fester inside of me as long as I live._

It’s terrifying, that feeling. And the terror makes him suddenly and fiercely angry. He’s been angry at it all before, but it was a passing thing; a moment of rage mixed with longing at Bucky’s wrists or mouth or his gentleness, at the way he cares for Steve so absently and so kindly with never asking for anything in return, though Steve would give it in a second if Bucky ever made any noise about wanting it. Or rage at the fact that Bucky doesn’t want Steve, he wants the fellas in his dance halls that leave bites on his neck (and it’s not like that doesn’t make sense and all but it still makes him angry). 

This is worse, deeper. This is a screaming rage, a howl of loss that somehow sticks to him. _I will love you ‘til I die and I can’t put that down._

“Steve?” Heather says, her hand on his wrist, careful. “Are you all right? You looked so far away.”

“Too much to drink, I think,” Steve says. “Don’t worry. I’m fine.”

He manages _fine_ for two more weeks, the anger and frustration and hopelessness of it all burning in his chest, and he only manages it by ducking into their room when Bucky gets home and pretending to have been asleep, getting up and leaving early and prowling the streets of the city, stopping on park benches to sit for hours before he has to go to work so he won’t have to be home alone with him. He wonders that if he makes it hurt enough, that pull back home, that soft corner of him that loves Bucky, it’ll die off and then everything will go back to the way it was. He thinks maybe he has to try to starve it. If he lives for two weeks, three, four, five without Bucky asking him how his ear is or complimenting his artwork or letting his shoulder sit calm against Steve’s on the couch — it’ll be easier to live with only some of what he wants.

He’s on one of his prowls on a Friday evening, feeling hollow — like he’s a shell granted movement, someone controlling him from somewhere else entirely — when he finds two drunk, tall, belligerent men stumbling through an alley, and he turns and walks right in their faces, gets in their way, and words spill from his mouth, insults and jokes that don’t land, until it’s enough to get them to punch him. He sees him do it all like it’s from a great distance, but at that punch, he rattles back into his skin, and he thinks, almost viciously — _okay. This. This is what I need._

When fighting, at least, or being fought, as the case may be, everything in his head stills, goes quiet; it’s selfish and it’s rotten and it’s awful, but it _works,_ for a breathless ten minutes while his ribs get battered and a fist glances across his face and bloodies his nose. Steve backs up and lifts his hands, squares off. He can feel the blood dripping down his face, over his panting mouth, and he licks at it absentmindedly, nervously. His whole body’s screaming; it’ll ache, tomorrow, and the next day and the next, and however long it takes for the whirlwind on the inside of him to reach out again and overcome everything physical. But right now — right now. Right now he can isolate what he’s feeling. Right now he’s in pain from something easily explainable. Right now things are simple, and it makes him grin savagely despite the blood on his chin. 

There’s a word for this. 

A _word,_ not just a swirling feeling in his chest that makes him melancholy and angry and elated in turn. Just a word. Fight. 

It’s the most selfish fight he’s ever been in, which is saying a lot. 

“Get out of here, kid,” one of the men says, slurring the words together. “Not gonna fight—”

Steve swings at him and actually manages to land a hit right in his stomach, right where it hurts most. “Come on,” he hisses, “come on—”

“What the _hell,_ ” says someone, from the alley’s mouth. 

Steve almost whirls on him, too, except that it’s Bucky, and he’s standing there tight-shouldered and tighter-eyed and the fight leaves Steve’s fists and goes into his chest, instead. He wipes at the blood on his face, like that’ll help. 

“Gentlemen, I’m real sorry about him,” Bucky says, then, taking over. Steve can see his mind moving, gears clicking together. “He’s — I’m sorry.” He grabs Steve by the arm and hauls him off. 

The men yell something after them, but it’s indistinct, swallowed by the alley. Steve’s heart pounds and his stomach churns, and Bucky’s grip is like iron on his upper arm, and he doesn’t look at him the whole way home. 

Steve ends up sitting on their counter, Bucky running a wet rag over his face with a furrow between his brows the whole time, like there’s something wound up inside of him that won’t let loose. Steve stays quiet as it happens, but his hands are shaking, from rage and something harder to articulate than that; a fierce, unsettling sort of fear. It’s like there’s a dark cloud hovering in the kitchen with them, and Steve, unable to resist, pokes at it.

“You didn’t have to come after me,” he says. 

Bucky backs off until he’s leaning against the wall of their kitchen, the window right next to him. He’s holding the bloody rag in one hand, balled up like he wants to throw it. 

“I didn’t have to, huh?” he snaps. “You _like_ getting punched?”

“Today I did,” Steve says, mulishly. “What the hell does it matter?”

“What does it—” Bucky makes some inarticulate noise of rage, and turns away for a minute, free hand pressed to his forehead, thumb rubbing a circle over his temple. When he turns back, he steps closer; when he speaks again, it’s softer, more pleading. “What’s goin’ through your head, Stevie?”

Steve takes the rag from him and presses it to his nose. “Funny,” he says, “I’ve been trying to answer that same question.” 

How could you even start explaining, he wonders. You’d have to go all the way back to the beginning, all the way back to a month ago with Bucky drunk in his bed, his laughing eyes. Maybe even further than that, to February when he came home grinning all secretive; maybe last November when they went to go see Fred Astaire in that film and Bucky went again, two more times. And everything in between it, the way he sometimes wants to tear Bucky limb from limb just for having the nerve to exist, for making Steve need him so bad, for being cocksure and charming and soft-eyed, for still having a family and making that family Steve’s. For going out dancing with men and women that weren’t him, for having no idea about all of it because Steve wouldn’t tell him, or for not telling Steve in the first place about the men that he danced with. 

It didn’t even make sense. Steve couldn’t dance, anyway. All he could do was punch, and even that he was mediocre at.

“You’ve been sore at me since Passover,” Bucky says abruptly. “You won’t look at me, you talk to me like I’m not here. I thought you were just sad about your ma but—”

“Don’t fucking tell me what I am,” Steve snaps. He tosses the rag onto the counter next to him and glares at Bucky, ignoring as a dribble of blood comes down and hits his mouth. 

Bucky opens his mouth, and then closes it. “All right,” he says, slowly. “So you’re not sore at me?”

“Yes,” Steve says, then, angrily, “no. I don’t know, I don’t—”

“Jesus, Rogers, do you know anything or is it all empty space up there?” Bucky snaps back, advancing two more steps. “You wanna fight _me,_ is that it? Or was all this just you being reckless and stupid?”

“I dunno,” Steve yells back, “maybe I _am_ reckless, maybe I _am_ stupid, you’ve sure told me enough times—”

“You don’t get into fights because you’re mad,” Bucky says. Somehow it’s the surety with which he says it that makes Steve so angry he could scream. Wasn’t this what he’d wanted, for all these weeks? Proof that he was known as well as he knew Bucky? Why the hell should it make him mad? “You get into them because you think it’s a way you can help, but you weren’t doing that today. So something’s wrong, and I think it’s to do with me, and I want you to _tell me_ because I can’t—”

“Can’t _what?_ ” Steve says, hopping off the counter and striding over, wiping the blood across his face as he goes. “Can’t guess? Can’t feel guilty about it any longer?”

“I can’t fucking _stand_ it, Steve,” Bucky says, and his voice cracks a little, which should make Steve sad, and it _does,_ but it also just makes him angrier. 

“So guess,” Steve says, and spreads his arms in a challenge. “Guess why I’m sore.” 

“You’re not just sore,” Bucky counters. “I’ve never seen you like this.”

Steve knows he’s right. He’s so angry he’s bursting with it, like it doesn’t all fit; like the conflicting emotions of love and lust and anger and fear are all spilling out of him at the seams. Anger’s the easiest to recognize, so that’s what he holds on to. 

_This is what you do to me,_ he thinks, suddenly miserable along with the anger, _and I don’t know how to make it stop._ He feels torn open, razed, and he hasn’t even said anything. This thing he’s been hiding away might as well be right out in the open, coming out with the blood from his nose. 

“Something happened at Passover,” Bucky says. “Did Becca say something to—?”

“It’s nothing to do with _Becca,_ you goddamn idiot,” Steve yells, and thinks, _I don’t know how to make it stop except to end it, and I don’t know how to end it except to tell, not when it’s so close to being told every second,_ and he’s always been impulsive, always been reckless, just like Bucky says, despite how he denies it. 

“So it _has_ got to do with me,” Bucky says. “What, Steve? What the hell did I do?”

“It’s not _that,_ either,” Steve says. _You’re a rotten, selfish bastard, Steve Rogers._ “It’s just that I don’t know how to let it be _enough.”_

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You,” Steve says, and waves a hand at him, “you came with me to church, and to see Ma, and you live here, and you _invited me to fucking Passover,_ and I don’t know how to not want—”

It strangles itself quiet in his throat. Bucky is gaping at him, mouth open. He seems incapable of saying anything. Steve feels wrung out, like he’s been through a hurricane and now he’s in the eye. And Bucky’s still staring, and Steve doesn’t know what for, so he does what he does best and goes on the offensive, tipping his chin up and clenching his jaw, steadying himself for a punch. 

And then he says it. 

“I’m in love with you, you dumb fuckin’—”

The fist to his face never comes, because instead, Bucky’s kissing him. 

It’s not a gentle, first-time kiss, it’s a punch of a kiss; Bucky’s hands are in his hair and Steve is backed up against the counter before he even really knows what’s going on, and then before he can do much more than growl and reach up for Bucky’s hair, too, he’s being lifted onto the countertop.

He licks into Bucky’s mouth and tastes his own blood, and Bucky grins. 

There is a terrified moment where Steve can only think _I don’t know how to do this,_ because he’s only done this in dreams, but the coppery tang against his lips reassures him; it’s not perfect, so it must be real. And if it’s real and imperfect then maybe Steve can make all the mistakes he needs to make in the process. 

He realizes he’s thinking too hard about other shit when Bucky’s tongue is in his mouth and he should really be thinking about that instead. So he tilts his head and draws his knees around Bucky’s hips, because he knows he wants to be closer, any way he can. Bucky’s hands had been on the backs of his thighs for a half a minute, lifting him up, but now he’s got one braced on the counter and the other splayed across Steve’s back. Steve’s hands haven’t left Bucky’s hair. He doesn’t know if he could let go, if he tried. He’s dizzy with it, touch and heat and the hungry tenderness with which Bucky kisses him. He remembers lying in the dark and watching the rise and fall of his chest, and he wonders how many times it’s been the other way around. He wonders if his heart will burst from the strain, here and now, of getting everything he thinks he’s ever wanted. 

Bucky pulls back, breathing hard. Steve had forgotten about breathing. He’d forgotten everything. “Jesus,” Bucky says, voice gravelly, “look at you.”

Steve leans forward again, chasing his mouth, but Bucky leans back. Something crushing and sharp falls through Steve’s chest. “Buck—”

“I’m not kissing you when you might have a broken nose,” Bucky says, “not any more than I already did, at least.” Just as quickly as it appeared, the sharp thing vanishes. 

“You don’t have to kiss me,” Steve says, reckless, and hooks his heel behind Bucky’s leg, draws him back in. 

That’s apparently a good enough demonstration of his intent, because Bucky laughs, choked off and disbelieving. “What the hell am I gonna do with you?”

“You could—”

“No,” Bucky says, then his hands skim down Steve’s sides and he adds, “I mean, not _never,_ Christ, but it’s a rhetorical question. You gotta explain some things first.”

“Could explain ‘em just as well later.”

“Steve,” Bucky says, and there’s so much open affection in it that Steve relents, smoothing down Bucky’s hair and letting his hands drift to his shoulders.

“All right,” he says, grudging, “but I don’t know what there is to explain.”

“You say you’re in love with me,” Bucky says. “Start there.”

Somehow that’s what makes the back of Steve’s neck flush. “Well, I am,” he says, like a challenge again, a gauntlet thrown onto the drawbridge of a castle. 

“But you’re not queer,” Bucky says, “I mean, you can’t be, you’re head over heels for Katherine Hepburn.”

Steve starts laughing, he can’t help it. It’s a little hysterical, maybe. He reaches up and takes the collar of Bucky’s shirt in his hands. “Sure I am,” he says. “And Cary Grant, and Margaret from when we were in middle school, and Elaine who works at the fruit stand, and you. There’s no one I’m more head over heels for than you.” Bucky still looks baffled — not like he doesn’t believe Steve, not really, but like he can’t believe his own ears. “I don’t know, I like both fine, it’s all just the same. And I’m not just saying that,” he adds, before Bucky can say anything. “I would’ve figured it out sometime if not for you, you just — helped me along a bit is all.”

“Helped you along,” Bucky repeats.

“Sure,” Steve says. “You know, with your—” He gestures at Bucky, feeling a little foolish. “With your arms and your shoulders and the way you get freckles, just there.” He brushes a thumb cautiously over the bridge of Bucky’s nose. With his laughter, the frenzied feeling in his chest had dissipated, and now he only feels a slow, nervous anticipation. “The way you smile at me when you think I’ve said something funny or kind or smart. I got to thinking how I’d never get tired of it. Then I got to thinking how — how you went out places with men and you hadn’t ever told me about it, and I was sore about it for so long thinking you didn’t trust me, and then you were going out one night and you had this mark on your neck.” He moves his thumb to the spot, just over Bucky’s pulse; he can feel it when he presses down, pumping like mad. “And I about lost it, I was so jealous.”

“You were?” Bucky says, hushed. He presses in close again without seeming to realize that’s what he’s doing. Steve sucks in a breath with how powerful that makes him feel, how astonishing it is to be wanted. 

Steve nods. “I dreamed about you,” he says, and fits his mouth over that spot on Bucky’s neck, just where his thumb had been. He lets his teeth dig in, and Bucky makes a sharp noise, but not one of pain. “That night. I woke up sweating and thinking about you.”

Bucky makes the noise again, a choked-off moan. “Christ Jesus,” he says. “You’re gonna be the death of me.”

Steve grins. “Your turn.”

“I don’t have a story like you do,” Bucky warns. “I always knew, I think. I just never thought you’d—”

“Want you?” Steve interrupts. “ _Look_ at you. Fuck, look at _me._ I would be — I’m _lucky._ ”

“Want _this,_ ” Bucky says. “A life of this, when you could have . . . what’s normal.” Then his eyes narrow. “And we gotta come back to you thinking you’re not good-looking.”

“I’m _not,_ ” Steve says, because maybe Bucky likes him but he doesn’t need him to pretend to be blind, “and I’ve never wanted anything like I want you. Like I want life with you. Just this, forever.” He gestures at the room around them, then leans forward and rests his forehead against Bucky’s. “That’s what I realized at Passover. That you’re the only person I—” He laughs. “Becca did say something, I guess,” he explains. “She said you were never gonna get married. And I was thinking how you’ve always been there and I always want you to be and that’s something like being married, isn’t it? That and how I want you to fuck me and all.”

Bucky’s ears are red. “You — I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.”

“Why, ‘cause it embarasses you?” Steve says, to be a shithead about it.

“No,” he says. “Because you still might have a broken nose and _maybe_ something messed up with your ribs and it’s making it hard for me to not get on my knees right here in the fuckin’ kitchen.”

Steve swallows. The words send an unrepentant dash of heat to his gut. “I mean,” he says, “theoretically you wouldn’t be near my nose or my ribs,” and Bucky laughs a little, strained. 

“Guess I wouldn’t,” he agrees. His hands are shaking on the counter, and they shake more when he moves them to Steve’s thighs. Steve wonders if he should be concerned, but then again, his hands are shaking, too. Anticipation, and nervousness. 

Bucky kisses him again, careful, slow; mindful of Steve’s nose. It’s not the frantic kiss that had rattled into Steve’s bones earlier, but it’s _good,_ easy and warm, and one of Bucky’s hands slides up from his thigh to tug at his shirt where it’s tucked into his pants. Steve thinks, a little frantic again, _this is happening,_ and he pushes Bucky’s suspenders down and gets to work on the buttons of his shirt, only to be distracted when Bucky moves away from his mouth and kisses down his neck, pausing at his collarbone to suck and—

“Bed,” Steve gasps, alive with that feeling, with teeth on his neck, and maybe he gets why Bucky had looked at him like that before, “you’re right, you’re right, I don’t wanna do this in the fuckin’ kitchen,” and he holds onto Bucky’s hair with one hand and cradles the back of his head in the other as Bucky grins against his neck and picks him up again. Steve’s hard, he’d known he was hard, but somehow it’s a shock to find Bucky hard too, and he groans with it, and brings Bucky’s mouth back to his as they stumble down the hallway. Bucky groans too, possibly related. It might be because he hits his elbow against the wall. 

Steve laughs. Everything feels so good right now, he has to. And Bucky lays him down on his bed and looks at him like he’s made up of all the bright and good things in the universe, all of them at once. And Steve knows he’s not, neither of them are, but it’s nice to be looked at like that, like you could be the solution to every problem a person has. Like the bad parts of you could be smoothed by that other person, that you could smooth theirs. Like the world is all made of gold.

“I love you too,” Bucky says. It comes out quiet. It comes out hushed and reverent. “You know that. You have to know that.”

“I do,” Steve says. “Kiss me.”

He does.

A few days later, Steve wakes up to hear _Cheek to Cheek_ playing tinnily from Bucky’s radio in the kitchen. He yawns, and stretches out a hand next to him, only to be greeted with empty space where in all of the past couple mornings there has been a warm, breathing Bucky. He grunts, annoyed, and sits up, trying to rub the sleep out of his eyes. 

Outside, the world is warming up; spring is on its last legs and summer is charging in with a banner held high, ready to make the pavement hot and the air sticky, to coax all of New York’s citizens out to the beach. Steve opens the window and breathes it in for a second. Oranges from the fruit stand down the street, sun-drenched brick. He grins and then follows the music.

To his surprise, Bucky is working on dancing again. It’s not for Steve’s benefit, because he hasn’t told him yet that he likes him when he dances, but he leans against the wall anyway to watch him, shoulder warm against the cool wood. Bucky’s shoes aren’t making a sharp tapping noise like Fred Astaire’s, just a slow shuffling sound, but Steve likes that more. 

“You’re getting better,” he says finally. Bucky whirls around.

“You’re up.”

“Y’know,” Steve says, instead of answering, “I dunno what you see in him.”

“What?”

“Fred Astaire,” Steve says. He smiles. “I don’t think he’s all that handsome.”

A grin splits Bucky’s face, sharp and white, ever-charming. “C’mere,” he says, holding out a hand, so Steve goes, takes it, lets his free arm sling low around Bucky’s waist. “It’s not about how he looks, it’s about the way he dances,” Bucky tells him, effortlessly doing a few steps as Steve clumsily follows along. 

“Sure,” Steve says, raising his eyebrows. 

Bucky laughs. “C’mon,” he says, “haven’t you ever liked a fella that could dance?” His eyes are bright, and he only asks because he knows the answer, and Steve smirks before he stretches up to kiss him.

“Only you,” he says, before he closes the gap. Bucky tastes like coffee, like morning, his mouth moving against Steve’s with a (now) more-practiced ease. Steve bites down gently on his lip before he pulls away, and looks up to note with satisfaction that Bucky’s grin is now a little more dazed than teasing.

“Well,” he says, and twirls Steve around again, just for the fun of it. “That’s a start.”

**Author's Note:**

> (title from e.e. cummings)
> 
> most likely there are some vivid misrepresentations of late 1930s social etiquette but you know what? though i proclaim to enjoy historical accuracy i will let it rest. i did try to make sure all the movies and songs referenced are true to era though i am sorry there's no billie holiday in here. also i deeply wanted to make steve note in words that rita hayworth is the hottest woman alive because i am a lesbian and i have rights, but she was also, unfortunately, Not Big Yet (her breakout role was actually with fred astaire in a movie called you'll never get rich! it came out in 1941! it is entirely possible that steve and bucky went to see it together! Much To Think About)
> 
> additional fun fact: bringing up baby was a box office flop when it first came out, which makes it much funnier to imagine steve in the theatre with like 3 other people avidly watching cary grant. 
> 
> anyway welcome to the series i am going to call "emma rewrites the mcu, kind of" because it is all about me saying "Gay Rights!" and "Character Studies!" and "Canon? I Don't Know What That Is, Actually" while banging on pots and irritating everyone who has sensibly realized the mcu is a little bit of a trainwreck. i also know this but unfortunately i love the characters. up next hopefully is a fic that is right now titled "clint barton, the most depressed man in the world" in my google drive but will hopefully get a better title before i actually post it. [tips my hat]


End file.
